Abstract
What possible advantage can there be in reading Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems of talking birds in an ecofeminist way? Can his poems’ subjective stance be seen to be affected by the nonmale and nonhuman voices around him? This book seeks to explore that very possibility, and surprisingly, Chaucer does not disappoint, even with such a contemporary lens. We have for centuries traced how animals represent humans in texts, and these poems are no exception to that feature. What we now are probing is how the alterity of the animal is not entirely suppressed, and how Chaucer, in some odd ways, then is “becoming animal” in his search for his own voice.1 And this is good news, for it becomes one more reason why we value these texts.
What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980; trans. Brian Massumi, 1987, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 1456.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Many have commented on the association of bird song with human speech in medieval texts. See, for example, Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), p. 193.
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1989, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed., Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 2084–95.
Patrick D. Murphy, “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics,” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, ed. Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry (Albany: State U of New York P, 1991), p. 49.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, 1974 (rpt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), pp. 134–35.
See Cadava about the complex notion of subjectivity, and Patterson and Leicester on its application to medieval texts. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes after the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991).
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990).
Peter Haidu, “Althusser Anonymous in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7.1 (Spring 1995): 69.
A major exception is the nonhuman agents of the poet in Carolynn Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2006), pp. 73–107.
Terence Rafferty, “No Pussycat,” New Yorker, June 20, 1994: 88.
For a compelling philosophical argument on the dual repressions, see Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).
See also Karen J. Warren, ed., Ecological Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990)
Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
Greta Gaard, ed., Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993).
Lynda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (Buckingham: Open UP, 1994).
Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham: Duke UP, 1995).
and Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds., Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethicfor the Treatment of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1996).
Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1995), as well as his “Prolegomenon.”
For ecofeminism in literary studies, see Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998).
See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004).
In a medieval literary context, Eugene Vance addresses the intersection of man and beast (lion and knight) in Yvain. Eugene Vance, From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), pp. 53–108.
Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, pp. 76–79. For more on medieval inquiry into animals, in addition to the other works cited above, see, for example, Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Best Poetry, 750–1150 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993).
Susan Crane, “For the Birds,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 29 (2007): 23–41.
Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994).
L. A. J. R. Houwen, ed., Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997).
Nona C. Flores, ed., Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1996).
Karen Blanco, Of “Briddes and Beestes”: Chaucer’s Use of Animal Imagery as a Means of Influence in Four Major Poetic Works, Dissertation Abstracts International (56.3) 1995, 920A, U of Southern California.
David E. Southmayd, Chaucer and the Medieval Conventions of Bird Imagery, Dissertations Abstracts International (41.8) 1981, 3596A, McGill University. Also, an issue of Postmedieval: Journal of Medieval and Cultural Studies 2 (2011) addresses these concerns, as will an upcoming collection by Carolynn Van Dyke, Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan) (forthcoming).
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), p. 12.
The category of animal studies has developed into a burgeoning critical area. See, for example, Lynda Birke and Luciana Parisi, “Animals, Becoming,” Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999), pp. 55–73 as well as the other essays addressing the definition of human in this collection.
See also Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism (New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000).
Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002).
Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds., Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993).
Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003).
Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Akadine P, 1982; rpt. 2000).
Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003).
Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990).
Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island P, 1996). See also the March 2009 issue of PMLA devoted to animal studies, 124.2 (March 2009).
For a more Freudian and metaphoric analysis of these philosophical issues, see Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000).
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 2008), p. 21.
Plumwood, Feminism, p. 72. From another angle, Julia Kristeva believes that Bakhtin’s dialogic discourses, those kinds of disruptive utterances that I will examine below, stand “against Aristotelian logic,” Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), p. 55.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 32.
Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: U of Florida P, 1971), pp. 224, 226, qtd. in Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 371.
Baker, Picturing the Beast, p.138. This question of the attribution of animal literature, and hence much medieval literature, to the realm of the preadult is one too large to consider here, but medievalists will need to address it in detail soon. Erica Fudge, among others, fruitfully discusses the representation of animals in contemporary film, Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 78.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard 1970; (rpt. New York: Cornell UP, 1975), p. 116.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 48–50.
Michael J. McDowell, “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight,” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelt and Harold Fromm (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996), p. 372.
Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006), p. 4.
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 11–20. Fudge comments on Haraway’s work and in discussing Nietzsche, points out that “we see what we are able to see, what we expect to see, what we have already decided to see, rather than what we might call the truth. The same, it seems, could be said of endeavours to understand primates,” Fudge, Animal, p. 130.
Donna J Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” (1985); rpt., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 2190–2220.
See Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006), pp. 66–106.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), pp. 3–25.
See, for example, John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981).
See also Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003).
Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, eds., Marvels, Monster, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute P, 2002).
Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991), p. 92.
Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), p. 3.
Mary Hayes, “The Talking Dead: Resounding Voices in Old English Riddles,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20.2 (2008): 125.
See also Andrew Cowell, “The Fall of the Oral Economy: Writing Economics on the Dead Body,” Exemplaria 8.1 (1996): 145–67;.
Bruce Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal,” PMLA 124.2 (March 2009): 616–23, for the irony of a riddle about dead animal skin written on such.
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967), pp. 32–35. Stephen Knight, however, identifies animal speakers as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s version of prosopopoeia, which “is merely a method of giving speech to an animal, object or abstraction that would not be expected in logical terms, to speak.” Knight uses it to classify the speaking crow in the Manciple’s Tale. Rhyming Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer’s Poetry (1973; rpt. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P, 1976), pp. 170, 177.
Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 175. Gallo adds in a note that Priscian (Praeexercitamina 9), Isidore (De Rhetorica 13), and Quintilian (IX, 2.32), all seem to have the same understanding of this definition, Edmond Faral, Les arts poetiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1923) 73, qtd. in Gallo, The Poetria Nova, p. 175.
Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal World (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1971), p. 12.
James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 39, 6, 18–19.
A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (1984; rpt. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988), p. 210.
See also Lisa J. Kiser, “Chaucer and the Politics of Nature,” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 2001), pp. 41–56.
For an analysis of the ascetic’s use of the animal body in dreams in the early Middle Ages, see Patricia Cox Miller, “Dreaming the Body: An Aesthetics of Asceticism,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. 281–300.
The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1947, 1967: rpt. Oxford UP, 1971, 1977), XIV, 6.
Copyright information
© 2011 Lesley Kordecki
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kordecki, L. (2011). Introduction: Avian Subjectivity, Genre, and Feminism. In: Ecofeminist Subjectivities. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337893_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337893_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29665-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-33789-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)